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This book, which arises from a seminar held in Dakar in 2008 under the auspices of CODESRIA, focuses on the key role of capital cities in state-building in the context of Africa.[1] More specifically, the book considers African capital cities as a key to understanding political structures, the latter being the result of states and regimes, but also of societies. African states project their visions and power in these central places; they are legitimated by materiality and symbol. But societies are also building themselves up in cities: not only is the location of decision-making powers an important factor for urban growth as well as redistribution in contemporary Africa, but countervailing powers and protests also contribute to shape the city. This collective book is co-edited by sociologists while the other authors are geographers, historians, urban planners, and demographers, in fairly equal proportion.

The introduction and conclusion are written by the editors; the other nine chapters are written by the other contributors, each chapter being devoted to a city and, occasionally, a series of cities. The interest of the book lies first in the reflection that spans the entire subcontinent south of the Sahara. Conakry, Dakar, Lome, Lagos, Abuja, Brazzaville, Nairobi, Maputo, Luanda, and the capital cities of South Africa, are successively addressed by recognized experts from diverse backgrounds. A second interest is the almost systematic diachronic reading of these cities, whose trajectories start to become complex as some of them were precolonial powers, the majority of them colonial ones, and all of them postcolonial (the latter having several facets, from the mimicry of colonial power to the radical rupture, subjugation to international demands, and the search for new paths). These two dimensions, comparative and diachronic, converge towards a conclusion, which also refers to other capital cities of the subcontinent. The book is also of interest because it produces a geopolitical reading of cities, the latter including an understanding of both urban space and the role of the city in its surroundings. Finally, the various chapters of the book contain a wealth of information about the various capital cities under investigation, including symbols, places of power and countervailing powers, as well as the challenges they face.

As it is quite normal in this kind of collective book, monographs of the various capital cities are unequal. Many are well problematized and hold readers spellbound. Without the sake of completeness, we include the one dealing with the political dimension of urban issues in Lagos, and the last one that deals with the question of the co-presence of three capital cities in South Africa. Some other monographs, however, are less problematized, but they nonetheless provide interesting information about the cities, although data are not always well connected with each other. In the last contributions, the recurrence of subtitles shows that the authors had to follow a fixed set of questions, which they struggled to answer, and which made them feel uneasy and which sometimes seems to have hindered them. For the book is not well structured. The aim of the book is inadequately defined in the introduction and it sometimes disappears over the pages behind the multiple manifestations of power (in that regard the key issue of land is curiously absent, except for Conakry and Lomé). More specifically, the term "powerlessness," which appears in the title, sometimes seems to mean the inability of the mass of the population to exert influence over the decision-making powers, and sometimes seems to mean the inability of the states to master urban growth, which has been spectacular during the last half-century, in cities where poverty reigns. Similarly, the recurrence of the term "urban geology" may raise geographers' hackles: it is never defined and the first sentence of the conclusion suggests a relatively awkward approach to it ("Cities are living geology, shaped by and functioning through historical layers of ambitions, efforts and constructions of meaning, set in natural environments of topography and climate, and subject to change," p. 193). Geographers may also regret the weakness of the maps. The conclusion, which provides a vast panorama, however gives a number of valuable guidelines that clarify the purpose of the book. But the diversity of cases and historical phases barely give an overall coherence to the book. It is quite certain that the political reading of urban space is an important task for multidisciplinary research. Obviously, this belief was unequally shared. Maybe it is more obvious where the capital cities, including their location, are the subject of a real debate and come to grips with the politics of the nation, such as in Nigeria and South Africa. Can we then think that there was a South African bias in the conception of the book? It is not impossible. It however remains that the political decoding of cities is now more necessary than ever and that the topic should be further explored. The target audience of the book is scholars. But the book, oriented toward urban studies and political science for the most interesting contributions, is accessible to a wider audience.

Note

[1]. This review was translated from the French by Elisabeth Peyroux. The original French version follows.